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4 reasons your rankings aren’t improving
Rebecca Appleton • 17 March 2021
Common mistakes hindering your search visibility
Building strong search rankings for the keywords that matter to you (and your clients) is an ongoing task. In addition to being a long term commitment, there’s also the small matter of the sheer number of factors that go into Google’s decision as to where your pages should appear on their results pages. Add in the fast pace of changes and the fact that what’s considered good practise and acceptable will change over time, and it’s easy to see how mistakes can creep in.
Here are a few common issues which will work against your efforts to rank better:
1. You have duplicate content
Duplicate content is something that can naturally occur on your site over time – but if you don’t tackle it, it can play havoc with your site rankings. Duplicate content is a common problem for ecommerce sites, who may stock the same product in different sizes or colours and have multiple pages for each variation, with identical product descriptions.
To ensure that you aren’t serving up multiple pages of the same content to the search engine spiders (thus muddying the waters about what they should index), use a canonical tag to specify which pages you would like to be indexed.
2. Your content is too thin
One of the major search technology trends to emerge in recent years is the application of machine learning and AI. This allows search engines to understand context and meaning – not only does this help in understanding user intent to deliver improved search results to searchers, it also means that it’s easier than ever for the search engines to spot poor quality content.
If you have favoured a quantity over quality approach to your content marketing, and have lots of pages with very similar content, very light content and content that only scratches the surface of a topic, you’ll find it very hard to drive your rankings up.
Good quality content tends to be more in-depth so it will naturally be longer, will be well researched, unique, informative and useful. The only way to weed out thin content is to perform a content audit – identify where you have very week, unsubstantial content and create a plan to improve the page and give your arriving visitor a useful, informative read instead.
3. You aren’t thinking mobile
Google will finally complete its transition to an entirely mobile first index this month (March 2021) – which means that you’ll need to think mobile to rank from now on. If you aren’t optimising your pages for fast loading for example, by squashing your image files and ditching Flash, you could be harpooning your ranking efforts before you even get started.
4. Too many orphan pages
If you have pages on your site that simply exist and are separate from other pages, you can’t expect them to rank well. For a page to be crawled and eligible for ranking, Google needs to be able to find it and that starts with linking to it from other pages within your site structure. That could mean via your main menu navigation, from a blog or even from your site footer. However you choose to approach this task, ensure that all pages are connected to give yourself the best possible chance of ranking well.
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